Theodore The Travel Trailer Redo

Darwin and I recently took a few days off from the nine to five and thus the madness began….

Day #1

Today is the day! Theodore is coming home to ABQ!

We paid the last bit on Theodore, hitched him up, and pulled him out on the road. (Let it be known that the last sentence of events took almost an hour) Once we got moving Theodore’s door kept popping open causing a few premature curse words to flow from Darwin. I found this very comical. After our good friend Zach very expertly strapped down the door with a bike tube (ahh, it is good to know boys who work in a bike shop) all was well and we were back on the road. We cruised down Route 66 into Albuquerque which made me feel very nostalgic for a time I will never know.

Onward to the backyard! We arrived at our friends Alex and Sierra’s backyard and the boys maneuvered Theodore onto a level brick section. Once there we walked around it and admired. Wow, it is really ours! We sat inside and looked around pondering our next step. Alex and Sierra joined us in the excitement of pondering for a few minutes and all was well with the world. Once Darwin and I were alone with Theodore we decided first thing first…Glass Cleaner, All purpose Cleaner, and tools. Why did we feel we needed cleaners first? I have no idea. As of date we have still not touched the them.

Day #2

It was super cold and cloudy today and almost immediately my toes went numb. Darwin officially pulled out everything from the kitchen exposing what we had anticipated, water damage! We have also discovered that everything has been attached together with screws from the 70s that are no longer made. After multiple trips this morning to various hardware stores we were left empty-handed. This means that every screw Darwin removes will be stripped since there are no drill bits in existence that fit. Every screw is very time-consuming to remove and comes with a short supply of cuss words. We did not expect this. Well, I expected the cussing not the screw issue. We also did not expect that everything was put together working from the outside in which means we are going to have to pop off the outside wall to work any further. Scarcastic Yay! It starting to rain! No more work can be done today. Our enthusiasm has waned from yesterday.

Day #3

Cloudy and cold today but no rain so we popped the outside aluminum off along with the windows. Theodore revealed another ugly surprise even more water damage! Darwin was way more chipper about this then me. I just stared at the dark rotting wood. I touched a piece and it disintegrated into the air then I’m pretty sure I breathed it in. How was this thing even standing? We took Theodore on knowing he would be a project but geez…I never thought I would be literally eating and breathing him! We measured pieces that needed to be replaced from the wall and made a trip to get lumber. We removed and replaced one piece before we came to the conclusion we would need to pull up the floor before going further. The walls are not sitting on the floor but screwed into the outside of it. Theodore is one gigantic puzzle. You can’t do one thing without doing another first. We worked until after dark with our focus now on removing the floor. When we tarped up everything and left, that damn floor was still attached.

Day #4

We ate our Wheaties this morning, gave each other pep talks and grunted at each other like Tim Allen.We are going to get that dern floor up! Within thirty minutes Darwin literally sat in the middle of the floor and reverted back to his five year old self. He slammed the floor with a hammer, screamed and stomped his feet. I walked away suppressing my giggles and removed rusty staples from the outside aluminum until he was done. After he collected himself, I was able to crawl under the trailer and remove a few stripped out bolts that were keeping the floor down only by imagination. A few more tugs and grunts later the floor popped up and Darwin triumphantly launched it out into the yard. We looked like the Flintstones as our feet dangled out from where the floor was. We inspected the now exposed frame. The frame where the door had been was broke and dangling in the wind. We were going to need a welder.

We both looked at each other and felt the pressure of the project we knowingly or not took on. We drove off into the sunset warm in the Stallion leaving Theodore wrapped in tarps until our next day off.